Top 5: Ridiculously expensive smartphones

Should anyone buy an ultra-premium smartphone? The answer is no, but we’re going to count down 5 of the most ridiculously expensive smartphones anyway!

Smartphones have nearly reached the point of ubiquity, and for marketers, that means that it’s harder than ever to sell a new device. While most manufacturers have elected to slug it out in three distinct tiers – specifically, budget, mid-range and premium junctures – some have chosen to offer something entirely different in the form of an ultra-premium smartphone. In this spirit, we’re going to count down our top 5 ridiculously expensive smartphones!

For this list, we’re going to focus on smartphones that, quite simply, have an enormous asking price which – to the rational mind – is simply ridiculous.

Without further ado, let’s get to it!

Fairphone 2

Before we dive into this one, let’s just admit that we love the concept. Many smartphones are produced in unethical conditions, and Fairphone’s commitment to producing an open and ethical product is to be commended in a sea of manufacturers that would stoop to new lows just to get a new product to market.

However, the company’s new flagship – the Fairphone 2 – asks a great deal for very little. Where one could buy an equivalent smartphone for roughly $300 USD less, the Fairphone 2 retails at a whopping $590 USD under the premise enough consumers will feel swayed by its promises of aspiring to the lawful good.

The Fairphone 2 sell with a 5″ full HD display, Snapdragon 801 Soc, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of non-expandable storage, and an 8-megapixel primary and 2-megapixel secondary camera.

Lovely specs, but at that price point, this is an offering assigned to those who prefer their produce served wholly organic or those who just favour ridiculously expensive smartphones. The Fairphone 2 might be ‘modular’ in the sense that components can be replaced, but for us, that’s just not enough.

Turing Phone

We’re glad we touched on military-grade titanium with the Vertu Signature Touch, because Turing Robotics’ Turing Phone took that concept and ran with it. The principle behind the handset is that it is to ‘represent a new age in smartphone history’ ““ beginning by both being unhackable and unbreakable, or so Turing Robotics claims.

The Turing Phone is, at its core, a 5.5“³ Android 5.1 Lollipop smartphone which is powered by a Snapdragon 801 processor, and carries 3GBs of RAM as well as 16, 64, or 128GBs of storage. The Turing Phone sports a 13-megapixel primary camera, and an 8-megapixel front-facing snapper.

What makes the Turing Phone distinctive is the device‘s use of high-grade material; the handset is constructed out of liquidmorphium ““ which, for the uninitiated in metallurgy, is a strong metal that bears 1.5 times the strength of titanium.

The Turing Phone could become the most expensive Sailfish OS device in history, retailing for a weight $610 USD. Could you see yourself forking over that much for an operating system with an “Android compatibility layer” just to run common apps?

BlackBerry Priv

The Priv is a device that we love to hate at Bandwidth Blog HQ, simply due to the fact that it is in equal parts a decent smartphone and a terrible marketing exercise.

One would imagine that the Priv – which BlackBerry CEO John Chen ruminated could be the company’s last phone if sales don’t pan out as expected – would be a middle-rang effort designed to attract the BlackBerry 10 faithful over to the Android pond.

Instead, we got a ridiculous, two-keyboarded smartphone that arrived with an AMOLED display at 5.4“³, a dual-core 1.8GHz Cortex A57 and quad-core 1.44GHz Cortex A53, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, and 16-megapixel and 2-megapixel primary and secondary camera respectively.

Where BlackBerry could have settled for modesty, we got a crazy blend of smartphone security mixed in a haphazard form factor. The worst part of the equation was that at launch the device retailed for a pricey $699 USD.

Sirin Labs Solarin

Sirin Labs is a new startup out of Israel which has produced the ‘Solarin’ concept phone; the Solarin doesn‘t target average consumers, and is instead positioned towards executives, CEOs, and titans of industry.

The device arrives with a unique design, and anti-cyberattack software suites from the likes of Zimperium. Further consumers can expect chip-to-chip encryption, a Snapdragon 810 processor, and downlink and uplink speeds of up to 450mbps and 150mbps respectively.A 23.8 megapixel primary and 8-megapixel secondary camera and a 5.5“³ IPS LED 2k resolution round out a package complemented by 4GB of RAM, 128GB of internal storage, and a 4,040mAh battery.

For all the mention of security, the Solarin arrives running Android 5.1.1 under the hood.

The device, which raised over $72 million USD in its seed round of funding, is set to retail for $14,000 USD. We think extensive smartphone security is a great thing, but not at that asking price – which is why the Solarin rounds off our list of ridiculously expensive smartphones.

Have you say!

What are your thoughts on our list of the top 5 ridiculously expensive smartphones? Which devices could we add to our list? Be sure to let us know your opinion in the comments below!